The Most Dangerous Animal in America...

Lemme' take a well-deserved break from politics and all that entails, to bring you an indelible event from my storied past.  One I have trouble forgetting.  And one I think you'll find, ummm, memorable as well.  

In my opinion, the most dangerous animal in America is the North American Broad Breasted Turkey.

They have been bred to grow fast, and big, and produce a pair of huge breasts that Americans can gobble down on Thanksgiving Day.

Not that there's anything wrong with huge breasts, mind you.  

Except these guys grow to about 40 pounds, are the size of a small car.  Not really, they just seem like it when they unfurl the inch-long claws they display on their hooves.  And trust me, they know how to use them.  

Yes they do.

I have personal information on that topic, as it happens.  There was a really big turkey farm a couple of miles outside of Marshall, Missouri, the unfortunate college town in which I chose to live.  Unfortunate for them, not me.  

And me and a couple of the buds got all liquored up one Saturday evening, deep into fall, and decided to go out and get us some of them there turkeys, free of charge.  As in, grab them up, while they weren't looking, take them back to the car, and then...do something with them...to be determined.  Later.  Perhaps.  Not considered to any great degree at the time.  

That's what happens when you get drunk.

So, me and my fraternity bros drove the short trip out of town and into the moon-slathered night (poetic, yes?).  It was so bright out that literally hurt your eyes.  So much so we could easily see out without our flashlights.  We parked up next to the fence and worked our way over it (trespass much?) and through the eye-high brush which formed a barrier to turkey freedom, and then onto the expansive ranch.  A ranch dotted with little white specks, all over the ground.  Thousands of them.  Tens of thousands of them!  Maybe a million of them!  We were overwhelmed at the sight!

BTW, do you have to be "whelmed" before you can be overwhelmed?

We creeped along, ever-so-quietly, through the sleeping turkeys.  When we'd gone maybe 100 yards, one of the guys said he thought it was time to hijack a few birds.  As in, pick them up, put them under our arms, and walk out.  As quietly as we'd come, hopefully.  But with all the turkeys we could ever want!  That was the plan anyway.  What is they say about best laid plans?

I think we had picked up one turkey each and began our stealthy retreat.  Slowly we made our way, step by step.  And then one of them woke up.  And began to express its displeasure at being hijacked.  Something we had not considered to any great extent.  Ummm.... 

Oh sh*t!!!, oh sh*t!!!  

When a turkey gets upset, and you're holding it under your arm, it begins to rake its claws against your side.  Quickly.  Painfully.  And trust me, it wakes you up out of whatever was left of a really good drunk.  And it brings you into a stark reality; you are being clawed to death.

Well I, for one, did my very best to wring that go**amm turkey's neck in an effort to get it to stop trying to kill me.  Have you ever tried to wring a 40-pound turkey's neck?  40-pounds?  You run out of arm before the turkey runs out of life.  And then you drop the miserable beast and run like the friggin' wind!  

Please God, help me out of this!

Well, to bring this awful chapter to a close, we drove with all abandon back to the fraternity house, bleeding like stuck hogs.  Squirting blood!  All over my car!  When we were able to lose the shirts and jeans and survey the damage, we were all clawed massively from just above the waist to mid-thigh.  I had about a hundred of them.  All bleeding.  Did somebody say we wanted a turkey?

We used every single band-aid in the house that night.  Hundreds of them, all scrounged from the other brothers.  Hundreds of them.  And we couldn't go to the emergency room, because that would raise too many questions.  So we were left to nurse out own wounds and try to pass the blame off to anyone else for our rather unfortunate expedition.  

It was dawn before we finished repairing ourselves, and before our fraternity brothers stopped laughing at us.  You can all be assured the turkeys got the better end of this deal.  And I had a hot dog for Thanksgiving.  It was years before I could look another, ummm, breast in the eye...